The National LGBT Bar
Association yesterday named Los Angeles attorney Jon W. Davidson as this year’s
recipient of the Dan Bradley Award, the group’s highest honor.

Davidson is the legal
director for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which describes itself as
the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full
recognition of the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals
and persons with HIV.

The association said
Davidson will receive the award Aug. 26 at the association’s Lavender Law
Conference in Miami
Beach, Fla.

A member of the State
Bar of California since 1979, Davidson has been working full-time as an LGBT-rights
lawyer for more than 22 years, first at the ACLU of Southern California and
then with Lambda Legal for the past 15 years.

“Jon Davidson’s hard
work and vision have delivered some of the most important victories in the
legal struggle for LGBT equality,” D’Arcy Kemnitz, executive director of the
National LGBT Bar Association, said. “On behalf of our members, we would like
to offer our congratulations and gratitude for all he has done on behalf of the
LGBT community.”

Davidson told the
MetNews that “it feels really great when your peers recognize your work,” and
credited the association as “an important voice in the LGBT community and a
great resource for lawyers serving the community.”

The award is named for
attorney Dan Bradley, the founder of the American Bar Association Section of
Individual Rights and Responsibility’s Committee on the Rights of Gay People,
and recognizes the efforts of a member of the LGBT legal community whose work,
like Bradley’s, “has led the way in our struggle for equality under the law.”

President Carter in 1979
appointed Bradley to head the independent Legal Services Corporation, which
provides legal services to the poor in civil matters. At his retirement in
1982, Bradley was the highest ranking federal official at the time to have
admitted publicly that he was gay.

He lived and practiced
law in Miami until his death of AIDS
in 1988, when colleagues and supporters on Capitol Hill credited the Legal
Services Corporation’s survival to Bradley’s personal efforts to fight the Reagan
administration’s plans to abolish it.

Davidson attended StanfordUniversity and YaleLawSchool, and began his legal
career as an associate, and later partner, at Irell & Manella.

He previously served as
a presenter of the award at the Lavender Law Conference, and in 1996 accepted
it on behalf of gay rights activist and attorney Tom Stoddard, Lambda Legal’s
former executive director, who was too sick to attend. Stoddard died of AIDS in
1997.

“Like Dan Bradley, Jon
Davidson sees the law as a powerful instrument of social justice,” Kemnitz
said. “Every day, Jon and his team at Lambda Legal place their skills as
advocates at the service of a vulnerable community. He is long overdue for
this honor.”

The National LGBT Bar
Association said over 1,000 practicing attorneys, law students, scholars and
members of the judiciary are expected to attend the three-day Lavender Law
Conference, which will feature over 35 workshops and panel discussions.

The national association
is made up of lawyers, judges and other legal professionals, law students,
activists and affiliated lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal
organizations. It describes its mission as promoting “justice in and through
the legal profession for the LGBT community in all its diversity.”